ECOWAS

On April 1, the election commission of the Federal Republic of Nigeria - a country with vast mineral wealth and a population of 185 million - announced that a new president had been elected, a professional soldier named General Muhammadu Buhari... Buhari’s foreign policy is notable for its proposal to «establish a special relationship» with the BRICS countries, particularly with Russia. The new president also plans to complete the creation of a free-trade zone - the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) - and to introduce a common currency in those nations...

Last week, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to send some 12,500 peacekeeping troops to Mali to take over from the more than 4,000 French forces that had been dispatched there since mid-January. That dramatic French military intervention was ostensibly to save its former colony from being over-run by Al Qaeda-linked jihadists... Al Qaeda-linked jihadists are the very same type of militia and fanatical ideology that France and its NATO partners are supporting in Syria to overthrow the government of President Bashar Al Assad. So, France is working with jihadists in Syria, but somehow the same kind of jihadists in Mali are a «mortal threat to Europe»...

The concept of crisis management in Mali has gone through an about-face. The Africans are made to refuse the idea of tackling the conflict themselves. The African Mission – AFISMA has failed. One of the reasons – it never got the funds it needed. The United Nations and the donor-states have refused to finance an African mission. But they agree to reverse their stand in case the UN would be a decision maker. At that, the very same AFISMA forces would do the job, but under the command of «international community»...

With France’s ignominious track record for disastrous military adventures on the African continent – the 1956 Suez Crisis comes most to mind – one would think that the former colonial power would have learned some prudence by now... With hundreds more French troops on the way and French tanks arriving from neighbouring Cote D’Ivoire, President Francois Hollande is in danger of leading his country into a fatal no-man’s land...

The situation in Mali is becoming ever more dramatic. The regime that has established itself in the north of the country (considering the configuration of the borders of the country, «north» is around two thirds of its territory) has taken an extremely brutal form. Today this is a place of savage violence... They have their reasons for capturing the north of Mali. Here, near Kigali, there happens to be the largest airport in the whole of West Africa, (built by the way, with the help of Soviet specialists) which can take the heaviest airplanes. Such planes are trafficking drugs from Latin America for distribution through Guinea Bissau and other African coastal states...

How could the Mali situation be assessed in the global context? One or another solution of the “problem of Mali” defines the stability in the whole Africa. The Tuaregs reside in Algiers, Mauritania, Libya, Burkina-Faso and other adjacent countries. An ECOWAS intervention in Mali may not only cause the process of the Tuareg national unification, it may spark rebellion of “native” Tuaregs in the countries contributing troops for the operation (first of all Niger). It means a rescue operation in Mali may generate explosions in a number of African states at once!..The goal of terror organizations operating in the northern Mali is creation of command and coordinating structures for the terrorist network activities encompassing the whole Africa.

Even if we accept that there was a plausible military imperative to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – to bring about a swift defeat of Japan and thus an end to the Pacific War – the horror of civilian death toll from those two no-warning aerial attacks places a disturbing question over the supposed ends justifying the means...